Dr. Will Caster is the name of the gentleman on his deathbed uploading his brain onto a computer. Perhaps writer Jack Paglen gambles on the name because he assumes the mainstream filmgoer will miss what the name does. However you choose to analyze the name Will Caster, it either foreshadows too strong or settles for a cheeky grammar school pun. Johnny Depp portrays Dr. Caster, a computer genius striving to create the world’s first self-aware artificial intelligence. Detractors accuse him of trying to create God but the Dr. wryly argues that this is what man has been doing since the beginning, creating various versions of God. The naysayers are neither religious zealots nor nostalgic luddites, but scared vigilantes willing to kill to thwart what they believe will be technology’s dominion over man, an idea more effectively covered in The Matrix and Terminator franchises. Academy Award winning cinematographer (2010’s Inception) turned first time director, Wally Pfister, fuses together a genre mash-up of science fiction computers, dramatic loss of a loved one in his prime, mysterious motives, and thrilling assaults to show the audience where our growing technology advances and addictions may lead. The melodrama in Transcendence is a bit too think to consider the film a warning to humanity to throttle back; the message is more metaphysical, let us consider the soul before we voluntarily hand it over to machines smarter than us, but lacking what we define as a soul. Will’s wife, Evelyn (Rebecca Hall), is more than his partner at home, she is nearly his equal in the laboratory as they work toward advanced AI together. After a coordinated attack on the country’s main AI research centers provides Will only a specific time to live, Evelyn and their best friend, Dr. Max Waters (Paul Bettany), spend Will’s remaining days attempting to transfer his consciousness into the digital realm. Evelyn acts impulsively rather than scientifically in their race against time. She cannot let her husband go and in her denial makes emotional decisions concerning a technological process nobody can accurately predict consequences for. Max, more cautious of the second and third order affects of merging humanity with technology, provides the plot’s counterargument. Only later after a few incidents of violence and AI-aided recovery do the philosophical arguments get pushed aside by more physically inclined initiatives. An AI with access to the world’s knowledge and cutting edge processing power has the possibility to advance medical and environmental research at a pace unfathomable to today’s most brilliant minds. The advantages its discoveries contribute to regenerating the human body and the Earth are mind-boggling; but then why do more and more of the film’s central characters stop to consider something more may be going on here? Morgan Freeman shows up as a fellow AI researcher wary of Will Caster’s growing power and influence and the U.S. government, represented by FBI agent Buchanan (Cillian Murphy), also takes notice of an expanding entity that may threaten national security. When firearms replace rhetoric is where Transcendence exposes some flaws in its aim to showcase AI’s pros and cons. Soon enough, explosive fireballs place the film on the same level as any other sci-fi thriller. Even though Pfister is a first time filmmaker, he brings more experience to the set than most of his peers. Pfister was the Director of Photography for Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy and a half dozen other blockbusters. His attempt to examine AI and its possible affects on our humanity is a discussion worth having but this script is not the vehicle that will deliver us any answers.